From the Editor

We are very proud to present Volume 12 of Totem: The U.W.O. Journal of Anthropology. Producing this volume has been an extraordinary team effort. Earlier this year the UWOAS made the decision to change the structure of Totem's editing team. Instead of a Managing Editor with a team of Assistant Editors, the UWOAS selected an Editor-in-Chief, and appointed two graduate students as editors of
Sociocultural/Linguistic Anthropology and Biological Anthropology/Archaeology. These positions were filled by Ted Baker and Jessica Metcalfe respectively and I have
been most grateful for their expertise, experience, insight and patience. This team of three works to make the final decisions about the journal with the aid of the comments on
the submitted papers provided by Assistant Editors at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In total, fourteen people worked to select and edit the papers chosen for publication in this volume.

Besides showcasing the finest student work at Western this year, one of the goals of Totem, as an entirely student run and student-content journal, is to involve as many
people and as many perspectives in the production process as possible. It is my belief that our collective experience and expertise has made this one of the most academically
dynamic volumes to date. Our goal is also to expand our readership and circle of submitters. As in years past, we sent the call for papers to other universities in Canada.
This year we have included a submission from a student at York University.

I was ecstatic at the sheer number of papers submitted for consideration to this volume. We have selected eleven excellent and diverse undergraduate and graduate level
papers reflecting three subfields of the discipline and the great variation within sub-fields.

I would like to thank David Kanatawakhon for his advice on the production process and his assistance in transferring his beautiful image into a format we could reproduce for our cover. I would also like to thank Othan Alexandrakis, Managing Editor of Volume 11 for his insight and advice. Thanks are due also to Dr. Andrew Nelson, for his support and assistance, and to Lindsay Foreman, who assisted with the trickiest parts of the formatting of this volume. Tim Bisha and Megan Gardiner were also very helpful in helping with the technical parts of working with the cover art. Thank you all.

Sacha Geer
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
August 2004